HMS Tudor (P326): Adopted by the People of Bridgend

Laid Down at Devonport

HMS Tudor was built at Devonport Dockyard, launched on 23 September 1942 and commissioned on 19 December 1943 under Lieutenant Stewart Armstrong Porter, a T-class submarine adopted by Bridgend Borough during a wartime Warship Week fundraising campaign, with the commemorative plaque marking that connection preserved today at the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth.

What a Town Bought for £300,000

Warship Weeks were a piece of wartime machinery that has almost entirely dropped out of memory, and they were extraordinary. Between 1941 and 1942 every town in Britain was given a National Savings target and a week to hit it. Hit it and you adopted a warship: you got a plaque, the ship got one of yours, and the crew and the town wrote to each other for the rest of the war. It was not literally buying a ship, whatever the posters implied. It was lending the government the money, and the ship was the receipt.

Bridgend and District Warship Week ran from 15 to 22 November 1941 and raised £300,000. It is worth sitting with that figure. Seven days, one Welsh borough, in the third winter of the war, and the modern equivalent is somewhere around fifteen million pounds. That was not raised by a few wealthy subscribers. It came out of a coal and steel town in weekly amounts from people who did not have it to spare.

What Bridgend got for it was not one ship but four: the submarine HMS Urge, the corvette HMS Mallow, Motor Torpedo Boat 47, and Tudor. Urge came first, and Urge is the reason the connection is remembered at all in the town, because she was lost with every man aboard on 27 April 1942, five months after the week that adopted her. Bridgend had put its money into a submarine and then lost the submarine and everybody in it.

Whether Tudor was adopted at the same time as Urge or afterwards, as a replacement, is not something the record settles. Bridgend's own account calls Urge the first ship the town adopted and says the money also enabled the others, without putting dates on them. The replacement version is the better story and may well be true, but it is not written down anywhere reliable, so it is worth leaving as an open question rather than tidying it up.

Either way the effect is the same. A town in south Wales spent a week of collective effort and ended up attached to a submarine on the far side of the world that almost nobody in Bridgend would ever see, and which spent her war doing things nobody in Bridgend would be told about for decades. The plaque outlasted all of it: the boat, the war, and the borough council that raised the money.

Seven Patrols in the Far East

After trials and training around Plymouth, Holy Loch, Scapa Flow and Larne, Tudor deployed to the Eastern Fleet at Trincomalee from mid-1944.

Her seven war patrols included beach reconnaissance missions and the sinking of a junk off the northern Malacca Strait, minelaying off the coast of Siam, the destruction of a Japanese coaster by gunfire off Sumatra, and further sinkings of sailing vessels off Burma, schooners and sea trucks in the Java Sea rounding out a varied record of anti-shipping and special operations work.

That list is accurate and rather undersells how odd the job was. Seven patrols between August 1944 and August 1945, and the whole of her war fits in twelve months. She sank a junk by gunfire on 22 August 1944, a coaster off Sumatra on 16 November, five sailing vessels off the Burmese coast between 22 and 29 December, and three more in the Java Sea in July 1945. One patrol in the South China Sea produced four torpedoes fired at a convoy and nothing hit. One patrol in the eastern Java Sea produced nothing whatsoever, and is recorded in the file with the flat and rather brutal word "blank".

A T-class boat was a 1,300-ton ocean-going submarine with ten torpedo tubes, and she spent her war shooting up wooden sailing craft with a three-inch gun because by 1944 there was nothing else left afloat out there to shoot at. HMS Thule sets out what that campaign was like and why the men doing it took so little pleasure in it. Tudor's tally is the same work, in smaller numbers.

The two entries worth pulling out are the ones that were not about sinking anything. On 24 September 1944 she laid ten mines off the west coast of Siam, which is a job done slowly, in shallow water, close inshore, with a full mine load aboard and nowhere to go if anything happens. And in August 1944, on her very first patrol, she carried out beach reconnaissance at Bireuen on the north Sumatran coast.

Beach reconnaissance is not the same thing as landing agents, which HMS Stoic describes. It means bringing a submarine as close to a hostile shore as the water allows and surveying the beach itself through the periscope and, usually, by putting swimmers into the water at night to measure the gradient, test whether the sand will take a vehicle, and look for obstacles and wire. It is done because somebody is considering landing an army there. Nobody ever landed an army at Bireuen, but that was not known in August 1944, and the survey had to be made in case.

A Postwar Posting to Canada

Tudor departed Fremantle in August 1945 bound for Portsmouth, arriving on 5 October 1945, and in April 1949 sailed to Halifax, Nova Scotia, for a three-month deployment training alongside Canadian surface vessels in anti-submarine warfare, a valuable contribution to Allied training cooperation in the early Cold War years.

That deployment had a specific and rather urgent point. In 1949 the Royal Canadian Navy had come out of a war in which it had spent six years hunting U-boats in the North Atlantic, and was now looking at a Soviet submarine force being rebuilt on German designs and growing fast. To practise against submarines you need a submarine, and Canada had none of her own. So Britain sent one, and for three months Tudor spent her days being hunted around the approaches to Halifax by Canadian frigates learning their trade.

It was a common enough second career for a wartime boat, and often a longer one than the war itself. HMS Trump did twenty years of it in Australia. Tudor got three months, and it is the last thing of any note in her record.

The End of Her Service

HMS Tudor returned to the UK in July 1949 and was eventually sold for scrap on 1 July 1963, broken up at Faslane, closing out the career of a submarine that had carried the goodwill of an entire Welsh borough with her from the Far East to the coast of Canada.

She had one commanding officer for the whole of her war. Lieutenant Stewart Porter stood by her from September 1943, took her out to Trincomalee, ran all seven patrols and did not hand her over until November 1945, and came out of it with a DSC. Continuity like that was uncommon; most boats went through three or four captains in the same span, and the ones that did not usually had a captain who did not come back.

The gap at the end of her record is the odd part. She returned from Halifax in July 1949 and was not sold until 1 July 1963, which is fourteen years unaccounted for in a single sentence. Boats in that state were harbour training hulks, battery-charging berths and alongside instructional hulls, useful and entirely unrecorded. She was finally broken up at Faslane, on the Clyde, a few miles from where the Royal Navy was by then building the base for the nuclear submarines that made her kind redundant.